Page 85 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

62 W.-M. Roth

grammar at all they distinguish grammatically correct from grammatically incorrect
sentences. That is, knowledgeably participating is (the same as) knowing. A more
recent example I have used repeatedly is that of a multi-age, one-room French village
school, where newcomers learn as they participate with ongoing forms of activities
and the oldest participants leave to go on to different schools. The classroom culture
maintains itself because there is a low turnover each year.
To sum up, human activities have evolved in culturally specific and historically
contingent ways. Because activities have inherent collective motives (growing
grain, baking bread, educating children), everything during participation attains its
sense in relation to the overall motive. This allows us to hypothesize that there are
opportunities in rural life (villages, municipalities) where students can contribute to
the collective life, which is inherently meaningful, and in the process come to accrue
new practices to an already meaningful way of living and participating.
This has immediate implications; and once I understood these, I changed the
way in which I was teaching and designing curriculum. The first thing I came to
understand was that the motive of schooling is not education (knowing), as one
might think, but as apparent from teacher and student behaviors, it is the produc-
tion and exchange of grades (marks), which are ultimately accumulated, like a
symbolic form of capital, to access real capital and further opportunities (jobs,
coveted university admissions). I realized that if students were to buy in and par-
ticipate in an existing form of societal relevant activity outside of schools, what
they were learning and doing would inherently make sense and students would be
able to learn by observing and participating with others they know. More so, what
they would be doing would profit the community as a whole and would not just
end up in the garbage can – in the way of so many assignments, notebooks, and
exams. Throughout my professional career as a teacher and as a critical intellectual,
I felt that rural life and rural communities provided so many advantages to creating
learning environments that did not exist in the same ways in urban and suburban
schools. And I desired to teach in multi-age classrooms because of the possibilities
to create conditions for true communities, those that reproduce themselves rather
than the ones that teachers spend so much time and effort to create anew each year.
All I had to do is find ways in which students picked up some activity, where the
motive already existed and orient the actions of participants, then learning was
guaranteed. Once students bought into participating in this or that activity, the
motive would orient what they did, give sense to their actions, and make participation
inherently meaningful because of an already meaningful world preexisting the
participation of the student.

Place-Based, Expansive Learning in Environmentalism

Taking my cues from the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric and prison systems,
where the residents of formal institutions (with mental disorders or developmental
disabilities and prisoners) were moved into community-based and family-based